Looking at the efforts Dave Winer is undertaking in terms of getting OPML to become yet another standard, I’ve been thinking about how formats get adopted. The key insight I came up with is that standards are actually a form of social contract and increasingly, data formats is following the same path. Looking at the history In order to look forward, it always pays to look back. The dominant standards for the web today are undeniably HTML (or its variances like XHTML) and HTTP. More recently, XML has emerged and, increasingly, RSS is becoming the dominant type of XML for sharing a variety of data. How did each of those standards become a standard. It is obvious now (hindsight is always 20/20) that standards bodies have relatively little bearing when it comes to influencing the succes of a format. Take, for example, SGML, which was the dominant standardized format for document formatting. It was quickly superceded by HTML which, at the time, was not considered a standard. The same is true of RSS and other standards for syndication. Formats like ICE, CDF, and NewsML were touted as the future when they were first introduced. However, they’ve recently been superceded by…

I keep trying to work on an entry to close the loop on the search engine and links research but RSS news is getting in the way. Last week, it was Microsoft’s welcome endorsement and a new set of extensions and this week, it’s Apple and its announcement of a new specification to add more data to RSS feeds used for podcasting. All this is nice but it seems that we’re seeing the beginning of a fairly new battle around RSS. Some History Before I go into details about Apple’s new offering, I want to give a little background that will clear up some of my confusions. I’ve been involved in the RSS community since 1999, way back when it was just the domain of geeks. Back in 2000, I made a few suggestions as to how RSS could be improved. At the same, the main version of RSS was version 0.91 and there was some interest in making a new version that would be called RSS 0.92 (yes, it was the alpha days of RSS). So five years ago, I was pushing for crazy concepts like adding a date to an item or finding ways to attach sound files…

I’d like to suggest a few optional additions to the specification. Here are some ideas I’d like to throw around for discussion: At the item level : This would allow us to specify a particular date for an item. I think it would be nice for those of us who have several days’ worth of content in their RDF channel. At the channel level: These could be encapsulated in to an section that would include all links to outside of the channel. : Much like points to the page the channel is for could point to a page of information about this channel. this could link to a FAQ or more information about the channel. : Points to a page where wireless devices can go. : Points to a page where broadband devices can go. : Points to a page where narrowband devices (browsers for blind people, text-only browsers, etc..) can go. : Points to a P3P page to check the privacy rules. : Points to either a VXML source file (which can be read by a VXML browser) or a sound file. For example, it could serve up a radio feed related to this story. : Same as above…